Monday, July 27, 2009

“A Teachable Moment”

I have had a lot of time to think and I have had my “Teachable Moment.” Let me tell you what I learned from the incident between Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley in Cambridge, Mass:

- Maintaining “Black Studies” departments in colleges is counter productive to improving race relations. Teaching hate in any form is bad. Black studies produced a professor who is hypersensitive to any encounter with any white person and views every potential encounter through the prism of hate and racism. Marinating a mind in hate is bad no matter what color you are.

- At enormous expense the white community has trained, coached, and sensitized itself to the plight of our black brothers and sisters however it will never be enough. The Cambridge incident is proof positive. The policeman who encountered Gates was uniquely qualified to have dealt fairly, impartially, and compassionately with that situation. However you can’t deal rationally with a person like Gates who is consumed by hate.

- There are race-based industries like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH, Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and indeed the Nation Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) whose best interest lies in the continuation of a race-based confrontation-based and separatist view of society in order to continue their existence. In short they seek advantage not equality.

- You need to avoid being what Sociologist Orlando Patterson calls a “Racial Arsonist” (a phrase he used to describe Al Sharpton). I know now that you don’t believe this, but everything involving a person of color isn’t about race. Black and Hispanic men are stopped, questioned, and arrested more frequently because they commit crimes in greater proportion to their numbers than white men do – every statistical study on crime will tell you that. It is not racist to identify, arrest, charge, convict, and jail a criminal who happens to be Black. It is racist to indicate that Blacks guilty of crimes are being unfairly treated when they are guilty.

- Perhaps the most important thing that I learned is that in those unguarded moments, when you aren’t reading from a teleprompter – we learn what is really in your heart – and it scares me.

The Nation had its “teaching moment” on this incident, but it wasn’t what you thought it would be. I certainly hope that you had your “teaching moment” – but based on all your public statements, it doesn’t appear that you learned anything.